The wolf abruptly retreats from my consciousness, from controlling our form. The transformation floods my limbs, my body, my mind, with utter agony. My spine snaps and reshapes itself until I find myself in control again.
Mirth keeps her back to me as I change, sliding her arms into her long sweater. But she glances over her shoulder, her dark lashes fanning against her cheek, when I’m finally crouched on human feet again, sweating and panting from the change.
She raises her chin. Her nostrils flare as she readies some poised and perfect retort. Some sure-to-be-ball-withering rejoinder already primed on her lips.
I straighten.
She blinks, taking me in. I’m completely nude, wearing nothing but the tattoos that scribe my arms and chest— and completely erect. Totally hard and ready to take up the challenge she issued. To use my fucking mouth on her if I can’t find the words that I need to say and she needs to hear.
Her lush lips part as I stalk toward her. Sharp sparks of the transformation from wolf to man still run across my skin. Whatever she was about to say dies on her tongue. Perhaps at the sight of my bobbing cock.
So I take that mouth, those lips, for myself.
Threading my fingers through her already mussed hair, I cradle her head in one hand and her hip in the other. I crush her against me. And I just fucking kiss her.
I kiss her like I should have kissed her in the fucking rowboat eleven years ago. Even if I’d never admitted it to myself before Mirth kissed me, I knew what I was doing, what I wanted, when I brought her out on the lake and played her that song.
I kiss her like I should have kissed her the next day, when I knew deep in my soul that I’d made an epically stupid mistake. But when I asked around, no one had any idea where she and Armin had gone. Or why they’d left school so abruptly.
I kiss her like I should have kissed her a thousand times between then and now.
I kiss her like I should have after Armin’s death.
I should have been the one to go to her. I should have risked the outright rejection I knew I deserved. I should have waited outside her apartment. Or at the gates of whatever castle walls she was sequestered behind.
I try to pull back. Just enough to give Mirth some of the words, to articulate some of the feelings rampaging through my brain. But she wraps her arms around me, twisting her fingers in my hair and kissing me back like I’m the only thing holding her together. Like she needs me more than oxygen, more than anything.
And I can do that. I’ve been shit at everything else she’s needed in our life together. But I’m capable of holding her, touching her. I can help anchor her in the moment, to just feel.
I palm her ass, bending my knees enough to grind against her core. Just in case she missed how much I want her. She gasps into my mouth, eyes half closed, fingers twisting harshly in my hair.
“No more games, Bolan,” she says, sucking lightly on my bottom lip. My cock twitches as if her hot mouth were sucking on it instead. “If you want me, you follow through now.”
Not totally clear if she’s being explicit, explicitly specific, I shake my head a little to clear it. It doesn’t help. “Now?”
“Yes.” She says it in that perfectly poised and cool tone that makes my balls ache. In need of her. “Fuck me now, here, or walk away one last time.”
“Here …?” I echo like an idiot. “I can’t fuck you in the woods, Mirth. You are —”
She grabs my hair hard enough to yank my head to the side. “Then don’t make any more promises you can’t keep!”
Her bright, potent anger is like a sledgehammer square to the chest, over my heart. She loosens her grip on me, stepping away and leaving me chilled without her.
I’ve missed something. Again. I try to think through the lust, through the haze of transforming twice in a row, of almost losing myself to the wolf.
Mirth must notice my confusion, because for once in our long years of terrible communication — all of that my fault — she offers clarification. Though not without a mockingly arched eyebrow and a now-ball-chilling look. “You said that if I ran, if you caught me, you’d —”
“I said …” A grin spreads across my face. I can actually feel the arrogance well up to radiate from me. “I’d fuck you where I found you.”
She takes a measured step back — taunting, eyes gleaming in challenge. “Liar, liar, Bolan.”
I lunge.
She pivots, trying to run again.
I get a handful of her long sweater, yanking her back against me. She throws her head back, trying to smash my face with her skull. She hits my shoulder instead. Wrapping a hand loosely around the front of her neck to secure her against me, I press my rock-hard cock to her ass.
She gasps. With desire.
